Episode 9 — Equanimity

 

Part 1 of my Vipassana Integration

This is Part 1 of a short reflection series born from the weeks after Vipassana.

These insights took time to ripen.

I am writing this five weeks later, and that already tells part of the story. Because when I came out of Vipassana, three words stayed with me: equanimity, wholesomeness and anicca — change.

At first, they felt like beautiful words from the silence.

Looking back now, they feel more like prophetic words.

Each one became the energy of the week that followed. Not in a neat, spiritual, journal-ready kind of way. More in the way life sometimes says: “You understood the word? Good. Now live it.”

And that is where I froze for a while.

Not because nothing had happened.

Because too much had happened.

Sometimes we do not delay because we are careless. Sometimes we delay because the experience is still moving through the body, and the mind has not yet found the right shelf to place it on.

So this is not a “current update.”

This is a ripened reflection.

The Week After Silence Was Not Quiet

My Ideal Scene sentence for that first week after Vipassana was:

This week I integrate the clarity of Vipassana, continue the cycles already in motion, and let the next structure reveal itself.

Beautiful sentence.

And then Monday came.

The first of June. The week the work on my home started.

Kitchen. Toilet. Plumbing. Men walking in and out of my house. No water. No proper toilet. No shower. No cooking.

After ten days of silence, body scanning, anicca, equanimity and inner stillness, I came home to sewage smells, chemical glue, open pipes, practical disruption and a house that was no longer fully mine for the day.

At the same time, the four men who came for the plumbing were good men. Polite. Proficient. Respectful. They looked me in the eye. They did their job.

And still, it was intense.

There is something deeply vulnerable about having strangers in your home when your nervous system is still soft from silence. There is something humbling about trying to stay calm while the toilet is out of use and the only option is a temporary camping toilet I had absolutely no desire to use for anything serious.

And yes, this was also the very real side of integration: no water, no proper toilet, no shower, no cooking, and a little camping-toilet situation that made the whole thing very embodied, very quickly.

So I held everything in until I could go to René’s house in the evening.

Very spiritual.

Very embodied.

Very real.

And maybe that is recognisable. The moment where you thought integration would look like candles, meditation and deep insight — and instead life hands you plumbing, smells, noise, inconvenience and no water.

That week, equanimity was not an idea.

Equanimity was standing in my own home, breathing through the discomfort, and not making the discomfort mean that I was failing.

The Body Knows the Difference

Then, later that week, after I thought the workmen might be finished early, the doorbell rang.

Two other men stood at my door, unannounced.

They were there because of the protected bats around the building. The bats sleep in the crevices between the stones, and before later outside work can happen, the bats need to be guided out safely and prevented from returning to those spaces.

In theory, this was good. Responsible. Even tender, in its own strange way.

But the energy of these two men was completely different.

They were not like the men from the plumbing.

Their gaze was not clean. Their comments were not respectful. They made it seem as if I was the problem for being uncomfortable with their unannounced presence.

They were only in my home for a few minutes.

And yet my body felt dirty afterwards.

That is something I want to name carefully, but truthfully. Because sometimes our body knows before our polite mind has formed the sentence.

It was not dramatic from the outside. Nothing “happened” in a way that would make a formal story easy to tell.

But something did happen.

My body registered their energy as invasive.

And equanimity, in that moment, did not mean pretending it was fine.

Equanimity meant seeing clearly.

It meant not gaslighting myself.

It meant recognising: no, this did not feel safe. No, I am not exaggerating. No, I do not have to make their discomfort more important than my own instinct.

That is an important distinction for me.

Because sometimes spiritual language can be used to soften what should actually be named.

Equanimity is not denial.

Equanimity is not letting people cross your boundary while you smile and call it growth.

Sometimes equanimity is the calm clarity that says:

I know what I felt.

Family, Rejection and the Old Ache

At the same time, old family pain opened again.

After the funeral in England, there had been this strong message from family: repair what has been broken. Speak again. Find each other again.

And yes, I understand that longing.

I carry it too.

So I reached out into a family bond that had become distant, and I was met with a very clear no.

It shocked me.

Not because I believe I am perfect. Not because I think I have never hurt anyone. But because I had not realised the depth of what was being held against me.

There are moments where rejection does not just hurt the heart. It confuses the whole timeline.

You start searching your memory.

What did I do?
What did I miss?
How long has this been living there?
How did I not know?

And then came the sentence that pierced me: that my love itself was being experienced as a weapon.

That broke something open in me.

Because how do you repair something when even love is no longer received as love?

I had to place that pain somewhere. Not suppress it, but also not keep it active in my body every hour of the day.

I know what long-held pain can do inside a person.

I know what bitterness, grief, anger and unspoken wounds can do to a body and a life.

So I had to choose, again and again, not to let this become the centre of my system.

Not because it did not matter.

But because it mattered too much to let it destroy me.

Later that week, I also spoke with my father properly for the first time in five years.

There had been a light connection around the funeral, but this was different. A real conversation.

It was liberating in one way.

And complicated in another.

He also spoke about family repair. About how his time on earth is shorter, and how the bonds in my generation matter.

Part of me heard the wisdom.

Another part of me felt the weight of a mission I had not been prepared for.

Because how does the daughter suddenly become the holder of family unity when the older generation did not always hold that structure themselves?

I do not say that with blame.

I say it with honesty.

There was love in the conversation. There was also a question I could not answer yet.

Is this mine to carry?

Or is it only mine to meet with as much truth as I can?

The Cocoon of Safety

Meanwhile, René’s home became my cocoon.

After the cruise in January, I had also gone into a kind of cocoon. Back then I slept in the room that had been my youngest son’s room — dark, tidy, contained.

This time, I went to René.

And I could breathe there.

I could regulate there.

I could come back to myself there.

We ate out a few times. Spare ribs. Takumi, which has become one of our favourite places — ramen noodles, beautiful food, low price, high quality, simple pleasure.

And sometimes regulation looked that ordinary.

A bowl of food. A safe table. René next to me. A moment where my body could soften without needing to explain itself.

Eating out has become a theme.

Yes, sometimes it is emotional comfort.

But it is also one of the ways René and I connect. We sit together, taste something, talk, laugh, observe people, challenge each other, love each other in very ordinary ways.

And ordinary love matters.

Especially when the rest of life feels like pipes, family grief, body signals and old stories being stirred.

We also went to a film connected to Michael Jackson, and it touched something in me around family, performance, Black generational patterns, discipline, pain and the way stories can be sugarcoated.

I did not need to analyse all of it.

I just felt how close some things can come to home, even when the details are different.

That is how memory works sometimes. You think you are watching someone else’s story, and suddenly your own history is sitting next to you.

The Small Readjustments

In between all of this, life kept moving.

I cut back the dead parts of my plants after the heatwave had browned them while I was away at Vipassana.

A small thing.

But also a win.

Slowly, I started meditating again. Breathing. Trying to keep the body scan alive. Not perfectly. Not as a performance. Just as a thread back to the silence.

I noticed social media slowly slipping back in, while also wanting to stay more wholesome in what I let into my mind.

I did some work for GIN member retention, partly from genuine commitment and partly from the old “good girl” energy of wanting to get back up to scratch.

Underneath all of that, I wondered again: Who am I to coach another person when so much is moving in me?

And then another part of me answered quietly:

Maybe this is exactly why.

Not because I have no storms.

But because I keep learning how to stand inside them with more awareness.

There were also practical and symbolic readjustments everywhere.

I signed up again for the Spiritual Alternative fairs in September and November, because part of me wanted Goddess Creations to become visible again in that way. Later, with hindsight, September would no longer fit because of decisions that came after this week.

I looked again at my customer journey.

I supported René with the birth of his music event idea.

I made a short birthday video for Jojan, which had to be thirty seconds — a small challenge for a woman who can easily turn thirty seconds into a whole chapter.

Around that time, another small but meaningful thing happened. Someone from GIN reached out because he had heard one of the songs Jojan had created from my Ideal Scene work.

The song was called Zachte Kracht Nu.

Soft Power Now.

And even that title felt like part of the week.

Not forcing.
Not collapsing.
Not pretending everything was fine.

Just a softer kind of strength trying to find its way through a very full week.

I shared it, partly because I loved that it existed, and partly because it felt like another reminder that my inner world was already becoming visible in unexpected ways.

You can listen to Zachte Kracht Nu here.

I ordered the Pussy Oracle deck after a friend had mentioned it, and later discovered that two cards had the wrong text. I contacted the seller, then the creator, and eventually the cards were reprinted.

That felt strangely validating.

Like my ability to notice what is “off” had practical use.

The same thing happened with money and administration. An invoice came from my garage that did not quite make sense because part of it had already been paid differently. Another small readjustment. Another place where life said: look again, align again, stay calm.

When Good News Also Felt Complicated

And then there was the hospital.

My neurologist said we would book one more appointment, and after that he would have to let me go.

Because I am doing well.

Because the chance of MS becoming active again at this stage is very small.

That is beautiful.

And still, I felt the duality.

Relief, yes.

But also a strange sadness.

If the doctor lets me go, who is watching over me?

Then I realised: maybe this too is equanimity.

To receive good news and still notice the part of me that feels abandoned by it.

To understand that being well can also ask for a new identity.

Not the identity of being watched.

The identity of watching over myself.

What Equanimity Actually Asked of Me

So when I look back at that first week after Vipassana, I see why the word was Equanimity.

Not because I was calm all week.

I was not.

Not because I handled everything perfectly.

I did not.

Equanimity was asked of me in the smell of sewage, in the absence of water, in the men walking through my home, in the shock of dirty energy, in the ache of family rejection, in the first real conversation with my father in five years, in the comfort of René’s home, in the pleasure of ramen, in the hospital room, in the invoice, in the plants, in the unfinished blogs, in the question of whether I was behind.

And maybe the deepest part is this:

Equanimity did not ask me to become untouched by life.

It asked me to stay in relationship with life without letting every wave become my identity.

I can be hurt and still breathe.

I can be tired and still notice beauty.

I can be behind and still be honest.

I can be disrupted and still be guided.

I can feel rejection and still not reject myself.

That is what I am taking from this week now, five weeks later.

Not a perfect lesson.

A lived one.

And perhaps that is enough.

This is Part 1 of my Vipassana Integration series.
Part 2: Wholesomeness — coming soon
Part 3: Anicca / Change — coming soon

If something in this reflection feels familiar — the inner clouds, the old patterns, the self-judgement, the emotional waves, the moments where you wonder whether you are failing when you are actually integrating — you may want to begin with my free 5 Human Clouds guide.

It is a gentle doorway into recognising what may be moving inside you, without making yourself wrong.